New World Gold Duplication Exploits and Player Bans

I’m not overly fond of covering drama, exploits, cheating or anything like that. But every so often, a topic like this arises that requires attention.
In this instance, it’s Amazon Game Studios and their horrendous handling of their new MMORPG, New World. And I say “horrendous handling” due to the number of bugs, exploits and hacks circulating ever since the game launched, and Amazon’s.. inability to accurately and adequately fix them.

So, New World finally opened up server transfers this week. And in typical Amazon style, the game is already riddled with bugs. Bugs that players are uncertain of whether Amazon will actually fix or not. Bugs that have already made irreparable damage to the game’s economy.
That has resulted in the ban of many players with no regards to the innocence.

Now bugs aren’t uncommon in games. Especially MMOs. But the sheer number of bugs that players have experienced in New World in the several weeks it’s been live is an extraordinary number.
This bug, though.. this exploit is by far one of the most damaging the community has come across yet.

You know what else is damaging to the community though? Not subscribing to this Youtube channel, which you guys totally should be if you’re looking to keep up to date with the latest MMO news – release announcements – gameplay and discussions every day, and, if you feel I deserve it, drop a like and comment on the video.
It’s a huge help for the YouTube algorithm!

But what is the bug, and why is it so damaging? See, upon transferring your character to another server, you run the risk of encountering a database error. This error makes you unable to add friends or interact with trading posts. However, you’re capable of sending gold to anyone.
This isn’t necessarily game-breaking, but what happens after relogging is. Once you log out, then back in, your gold is back.
But.. the recipient, the player that actually received the gold? They get to keep it. You can imagine how much damage can be done to the economy when players begin abusing this, right? Now let me give a little context here.
There are reports of players via Reddit and the official New World forums stating that players are sending the maximum amount of gold to other players – players that they don’t know personally in an attempt to grief them. To troll them. To get them banned.

A Community Manager for Amazon, Luxendra, addressed some of this on the official forums.

“We are aware of a small number of players who upon transferring become unable to save their progress on their new server. We’re working to address this for those affected, which we believe we can accomplish with data changes not requiring a patch. We will update when we’ve corrected the problem.

For anyone taking advantage of the gold duplication bug, appropriate action will be taken as it is considered an exploit.”

According to Lux, this bug only affects a small number of players. Which very well may be the case, but reports would lead us to believe otherwise. Then again, “a small number of players” could be pertaining to a percentage of players, of which there are millions active per week currently.
And in the same message, it was confirmed that players – in their words – “taking advantage of the gold duplication bug,” will have “appropriate action taken.”
This is where it becomes a little.. unfair to players. And much more concerning than upon first inspection.
According to a post made by Irru on Reddit, you’re actually incapable of rejecting mail in-game. What this ultimately means, is if someone that duped gold wants to harrass or remove you from the game.. then you’ll be forced into accepting it whether you want to or not.
There is no confirmation option whatsoever, meaning that players have absolutely no control over whether or not they’re “abusing the exploit.”

An easy solution to this is would be to simply do a roll back of the server. I mean, in all honesty I’m uncertain why the servers are still online currently. They’ve been online this entire time. Players have been continuing to wreak havoc with this all day.
Sifting through the comments on Reddit and the official forums, players are wondering much the same thing. Downtime, even a roll back is 100% preferable to allowing players this large an advantage – banning players who have no way rejecting the gold they’re receiving.

Now according to Amazon, and they might change their stance on this after seeing how rampant the abuse is, they have no intention of rolling back the server in an effort to compensate the players that were affected. Nor have they confirmed whether or not players that were innocent, yet banned regardless, will have those bans rescinded.
The reasoning for this is that rolling back the server would cause additional technical difficulties which would ultimately deal more damage to the game. Additionally, if players are receiving errors during the transfer of their characters, doing a roll back – altering the database in any form could result in the loss or corruption of every pending character transfer.

At the time of recording, this bug has been running rampant, completely unpatched, for over 20 hours.
I’m well aware that Amazon are working on attempting to roll out some type of fix as soon as they can – and by the time this video goes live they very well may have a temporary fix in place.
But this isn’t the first bug that players have come across. Quite the contrary. Amazon Game Studios’ ineptitude has become a running meme everywhere online, with seemingly new bugs, issues, exploits arising every time they attempt to do literally anything. Anything at all.
But Amazon aren’t the only ones at fault here. The sheer number of bug abusers, exploiters and scammers that take advantage of situations like this are equally as to blame.
Every day you log onto Reddit – or the official forums, there’s more drama. More people taking advantage of one another. It’s almost like real life.

I genuinely hope Amazon find some way to address this – though not just this, I hope they somehow show players that they’re a capable developer one day. Because this is unfair to their community. This exploit, and every other exploit that has went on to show how new to this they are.